Postal Predation

In mid-January of this year my friend Frank passed away. Frank was always a very generous man, for decades contributing to a lot of charitable organizations. Not always a lot but enough to get him on every mailing list in the world; at least it looks that way. Since part of the income of charitable organizations is in selling their mailing lists to other groups he receives stuff from organizations, both legit and bogus, that he never contributed to in the first place. As a friend of the family I have volunteered to take on this mail and, I must say, it has been a learning experience. I’m sure Frank must have had a “contributor asterisk” by his name or something because the deluge of junk mail is nothing short of spectacular and continues to be so after four months despite my diligent notifications-to-sender that this man has passed away.

I learned that just writing “Deceased, Return to Sender” on the envelope does not work since the post office just redelivers it to the addressee. One day the timing was right and I buttonholed the mailman at the front door and he said “Oh, just throw it away” (an exact quote) which is probably not really what his employer has instructed him to advise; even though they probably wish it were so. So I changed my tactics and began opening the mail and returning everything in the enclosed return-addressed-envelopes with a note that the recipient is deceased. This works well if the envelope has postage on them but many of them do not presuming, I guess, you would be glad to furnish a stamp with your check. Since charitable organizations have “junk mail” rates I didn’t think it quite fair that we should pay full postage to return it and, I learned, putting a 44 cent stamp on an envelope by no means guarantees that instructions to remove a donor from a mailing list will be followed.

Anyway, I am persevering and I am ready to out-wait any person or robot that opens envelopes and finds a coupon marked “deceased” and ignores it. Maybe one of these days I will notice an ebbing of the flow. In the meantime I think hundreds of dollars over-all are continuing to be spent on useless mailings by charitable organizations to this one deceased gentleman. I can only imagine the thousands and thousands (or maybe hundreds of thousands) wasted in futile requests for money to the general population who do not respond. “Oh, just throw it away” is becoming an option that is becoming more attractive as the months roll by.

One more note: I have not named any particular charity just because there are so many involved. However, the worst of the worst, The Humane Society and all its incarnations can kiss my pet-lovin’ ass.